Emilio Mantelli and early 20th century European graphic design on display in Crema

The Agello Rooms of the Museo Civico di Crema e del Cremasco will host from October 22 to December 11, 2022 the exhibition Una bizzarra bellezza. Emilio Mantelli and European Graphics, produced by the Museo Civico di Crema e del Cremasco and curated by Edoardo Fontana. The exhibition aims to acquaint a wide audience with the xylographer Emilio Mantelli (Genoa, 1884 - Verona, 1918), in the context of the rich artistic panorama of Italian and European engraving in the early 20th century. Mantelli was indeed a leading figure in this field and one of the most significant artists.

Following research initiated by art historian Paola Paccagnini and as a result of new investigations and numerous verifications carried out on original documents, the aim is to elaborate anorganic cataloguing of the artist’s engravings and an analysis of his personality, capable of overcoming some commonplaces regarding his little-known biography and artistic career that also takes into account his theoretical contribution to the development of the discipline in Italy and Europe.

The exhibition counts numerous loans from public collections, such as the Gabinetto di Disegni e Stampe di Palazzo Rosso in Genoa, whose collaboration allowed the exhibition of some woodcuts never or rarely presented to the general public. Prominent among these are the Poster of the First International Exhibition of Woodcuts in Levanto, made in 1912 and restored for the occasion with the contribution of the Museo Civico di Crema, and the extraordinary color portraits such as Le civette, Profilo di donna con limoni, Noemi, and Ritratto di donna con collana di perle, brought together here for the first time.

A group of paintings and pastels from the civic collections of the Genoa Nervi Gallery of Modern Art, the Palazzina delle Arti “L. R. Rosaia” in La Spezia and the Paolo and Adele Giannoni Gallery of Modern Art in Novara introduce the exhibition.

In addition to Mantelli’s major woodcuts, including The Brawl, The Merchants, The Spinners, Breton Nanny, Self-Portrait, Winged Victory, and the series of works dedicated to the First World War front, volumes illustrated by him and magazines will be on public display: L’Eroica, where his engravings were published, printed from the original plates, stands out for the quantity and richness of its contributions. In the period before World War I, L’Eroica was a true laboratory of woodcut, as it gathered within its pages the major Italian and foreign artists who devoted themselves to this technique. Mantelli intervened in the editorial staff of the periodical, largely conditioning its choices, to the point of bringing the primitive Art Nouveau and neo-Michelgiolesco layout, initially imposed by Adolfo De Carolis with his school, toward a moderate modernism.

Drawing on important private collections, in particular the loan from the collection of Carla Conforto and Agostino Pagano in Milan, it was possible to obtain unpublished print proofs annotated by the artist himself and by engravers of his contemporaries: to frame the figure of Mantelli, a part of the exhibition is devoted to an overview of twentieth-century Italian woodcuts that, from secessionist sources, turned toexpressionism and new trends. Particular attention has been given to those artists who influenced him and in whose cultural context the artist inserted himself. A section of the exhibition then compares some works by Italian engravers such as Adolfo De Carolis, Francesco Nonni, Gino Barbieri, Lorenzo Viani, Gino Carlo Sensani, Arturo Martini, and Moses Levy and places him in the broader European panorama with works by the German Expressionists, including Karl Smith Rottluff, Max Beckmann, Max Pechstein, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, whose presence is enriched by an important loan from the Luciana Tabarroni Collection of the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna, engravers linked to the Vienna Secession or from the Flemish sphere such as Frans Masereel and Edgard Tytgat. In this way, it will be possible to compare Mantelli’s Bimba che salta la corda with Eric Heckel’s iconic Fränzi(Nudo di fanciulla in piedi) (Luciana Tabarroni Collection) or instead his portraits with the works of Egon Schiele (on display is the folder for reproductions of the Austrian artist’s drawings, Zeichnungen, published in Vienna in 1917) and the Ver Sacrum issue containing Koloman Moser’s Ein Decorativer Fleek in Roth und Grun.

Mantelli’s is essentially a Mediterranean expressionism that replaces Brücke’s forced deformation of bodies with a reinterpretation of early Tuscan painting, naïve medieval primitivism and the Macchiaioli school.Also on display is a Portrait of a Young Woman by Giovanni Fattori (Stramezzi Collection of the Museo Civico di Crema), in whose School of the Nude Mantelli took part. His graphic art remains difficult to categorize, influenced by numerous tensions and never decipherable simply by the code of a poster. In Mantelli’s expressionism, not devoid of refinement, resolute and primeval and at the same time free and personal, is grafted a Deco decadentism, now superb in tone and now sickly in acid or garish hues, of absolute modernity and novelty, which foreshadowed, in prospect, a wholly personal evolution driven to a harsh and essential decorativism.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog of the works on display, produced by Edizioni Museo Civico Crema and in which the catalog of the artist’s entire graphic work will also be offered, with texts by Edoardo Fontana, Giorgio Marini, Marzia Ratti and Giuseppe Virelli.

For info: www.culturacrema.it

Hours: Tuesday from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m.; Wednesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to noon and 2:30 to 5:30 p.m.; Saturday, Sunday and holidays from 10 a.m. to noon and 3:30 to 6:30 p.m. Closed on Mondays.

Free admission.

Image: Emilio Mantelli, Noemi, detail (ca. 1914-1915; color woodcut; Genoa, Gabinetto di Disegni e Stampe di Palazzo Rosso Collection, Strada Nuova Museums)

Emilio Mantelli and early 20th century European graphic design on display in Crema

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